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astronomy Feature Archive of Articles

This listing shows you every single article in the Astronomy Site! The articles are shown in date order, with the most recent articles on top. You can also use the search feature to search for something specific. These listings are shown 10 articles to a page.

A volcano can produce a fiery sky with ash and deadly gases. The biggest one on Earth is Mauna Loa, but it's dwarfed by Olympus Mons on Mars which is three times the height of Everest. There are many volcanoes in the Solar System, including ice volcanoes.

Movies show people being expelled unprotected into space - they explode, they freeze instantly, their blood boils. It's not a pretty sight. Would this actually happen? Not really, but I still wouldn't recommend trying it out.

In Lucy & Stephen Hawking's book, the hero George used to have a quiet life, but now he's trying to rescue his next door neighbor from a black hole. Here's a lively illustrated story, beautiful color images of the universe, and from the man who knows, a great explanation of what a black hole is.

Join me on a Halloween astronomical tour. See a cosmic witch and cosmic ghosts, spiders and snakes, and fiery skull. But have no fear. It's a virtual tour and all these objects are a very long way away.

NASA sent the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to the Moon to spy out sites for future manned missions. It doesn't look like they'll be sending anybody to the Moon, but LRO has documented the Apollo landing sites. Astronomy writer and space expert Ian Ridpath takes us to the Moon for a look.

In 1781 William Herschel was the first person in history to discover a new planet. He was observing in the back garden of his home in Bath, England. The house where history was made is a museum and its new Caroline Lucretia Gallery is named for William's sister, the first woman to discover a comet.

We're used to a tidy Solar System. But there are some pretty strange planets orbiting stars far, far away. On one it doesn't rain water, it rains rock. Another has the density of cork. Some have two suns. And what would you do with a diamond the size of a planet?

A flying horse on feathered wings - it's the constellation Pegasus. You can spot it by its most noticeable feature, the Great Square of Pegasus, though one star of the square belongs to poor Princess Andromeda. There's also a star in Pegasus very like our Sun with a planet circling it.

More fantastic astronomy pictures from around the world were sent to the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England in 2011. Exquisite skyscapes and landscapes, aurorae and nebulae, and the expanding shock wave of an ancient supernova explosion. Young astronomers also continue to impress.

Pluto's not the last planet, it's the first Kuiper Belt Object. The Kuiper Belt is made up of millions of icy bits left over from the beginning of the Solar System. It starts at 30 AU - that's 30 times farther from the Sun than the Earth. From there it stretches for another 2 billion miles!